Evan Rachel Wood, who plays Dolores Abernathy on Westworld, has been taking a bit of flack on Twitter for this:

(Because I don’t trust Twitter embeds, she wrote: “You should never date a guy like the cop from #strangerthings Extreme jealousy and violent rages are not flattering or sexy like TV would have you believe. That is all.”)

Some of her critics have been tediously pointing out that Sheriff Jim Hopper is a fictional character, as if we don’t discuss the ethics of of fictional characters all the time. (Also, as I’ll explain in a minute, part of Wood’s point is that real people aren’t like Hopper.)

Many other critics make a somewhat better point, which is that Hopper never hits Joyce Byers or any of the kids. He may be filled with rage, but he doesn’t actually hurt anyone — except the show’s bad guys, of course. That’s not a completely satisfying response, however, because angry men don’t have to actually hit women to scare the crap out of them, and scaring the crap out of someone is certainly abusive.

All of which brings me to the point that I think Wood was trying to make with her tweet: Fictional people like Hopper and real people like Hopper are not the same thing.

Fictional Sheriff Hopper is a guy with issues. He gets angry a lot. However, no matter how pissed-off he gets, Hopper would never actually hit Joyce or any of the children. We know this, because we recognize him as a well-known fictional archetype: The Violent Male Who Only Hurts Bad People.

That guy is everywhere in our fiction, from James Bond to Dominic Toretto to John Wick. Many comic superheros fit the mold — Batman, Wolverine, Deadpool, the Punisher, the Hulk, Hellboy — as do many of the love interests in romance novels. Actors like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Dwayne Johnson have spent half their careers playing some variation of that character. When we see this guy, we all know him, and we all know he’s not going to hurt the innocent people in his life.

The objection that abusive men don’t have to hit women to abuse them doesn’t really apply either because, by the rules of the genre, the fictional women and fictional children in his fictional life are quite aware that he won’t hurt them. In Stranger Things, Joyce Byers is startled and confused by Hopper’s rage at times, but she never reacts like she’s really afraid of him.

(I didn’t re-watch the entire show, but I can’t remember any real fear of him. If I got that wrong, I’ll have to walk this back.)

Another example of this is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in Kindergarden Cop. He’s tough police detective who goes undercover as a school teacher. Much of the humor in the movie comes from the fact that no one is afraid of him — not the women teachers, not the lady principle, and not any of the children.

In the real world, violent people don’t follow genre rules. People with impulse control problems aren’t always able to draw the lines so carefully. They don’t just get violent with criminals and terrorists. They hurt people who are close to them, either because they can’t tell the difference, or because they just don’t care. In real life, guys who act like Hopper can be dangerous to have in your life.

We put up with a lot in fictional characters that we shouldn’t in real life. Fictional TV cops like Walt Longmire or Steve McGarrett beat the crap out of suspects, and we’re more or less okay with it, because Cop Who Breaks All The Rules For Justice is another well-known archetype. This cop may break the rules, but he always only does it to keep really bad people from getting away. This is unlike real-life rule-breaking cops, who are more likely to beat the crap out of 15-year-old turnstile jumpers who mouth off.

Another example is the character of Leroy Jethro Gibbs on NCIS. As a fictional character, he comes across as a stern teacher and charmingly gruff boss. But a real-life boss who bullies his employees, sometimes even hitting them, is an HR nightmare who drags down everyone on his team. 

Or, getting back to Stranger Things, let’s think about the character of Eleven for a minute. This is a child who was isolated and emotionally abused all her life, and who was subjected to unethical science experiments. And at every moment she is carrying a weapon — her dangerous psychic ability — with which she has already killed at least a dozen people. Knowing all this about her, would you really let her anywhere near your children?

It’s the nature of our relationship to fiction that we empathize with the protagonists of a story, even when they are objectively bad people. The move Bonnie and Clyde from 1967 is a notorious example that made a couple of murderous bank robbers into romantic protagonists. More recently, the writers on Breaking Bad used this effect with Walter White, intentionally making him into a self-absorbed violent jerk…who we still wanted to see win.

The effect doesn’t always work, however, because sometimes viewers have trouble getting past real life. I liked the Major Crimes police procedural stories, but every now and then I found myself yelling at the screen because they did something I had read about in one of Radley Balko’s gut-punching stories of police misconduct. I also had trouble enjoying the 1991 comedy Nothing But Trouble, about a bunch of big-city travelers who get in trouble in a small town ruled by a sadistic judge who likes to use a special machine called “Mr. Bonestripper” to execute people without a proper trial. It’s supposed to be a dark comedy, but I couldn’t get it out of my head that there are real places in the world where sadistic rulers find amusing ways to kill people who anger them.

For Evan Rachel Wood watching Stranger Things, it was Hopper’s out-of-control anger that was too close to reality. She knows a thing or two about sexual assault and domestic violence, and Hopper set off some warnings. He’s an entertaining character, but she wouldn’t want the real-world version of him in her life.

The most recent Alien: Covenant trailer comes with an opening commercial for Walter, the synthetic (a.k.a. artificial person a.k.a. android) played by Michael Fassbender in the movie. Here it is:

At the end, they flash a couple of corporate logos. I naturally had to step through them. The first one is a new logo for Weyland-Yutani, which is the name of the fictional corporation (usually referred to as “The Corporation”) that has been running through all the films. The second logo, however, says “Intelligence powered by AMD.”

AMD is a real-world semiconductor manufacturer, and I gotta say, as product placements go, that’s pretty cool. (Not Mattel-hoverboard-in-Back-to-the-Future cool, but still pretty cool.)

It says something about my life that I immediately turned to my wife and commented on the absence of Hyperdyne Systems. Then we shared a brief moment of confusion between Hyperdyne Systems and Cyberdyne Systems — one is from the Alien series, the other from Terminator — before reassuring ourselves that, yes, Hyperdyne was the maker of the synthetics in the Alien series.

This is why we’re married.

Back in the 1980s, I used to go see the Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Biograph Theater on Lincoln Avenue. I wasn’t one of those people who went every weekend, but I probably saw it maybe a dozen times.

In case you’re wondering, no, I didn’t dress up. There wasn’t any single character I wanted to be. My personality was pretty much Brad, but my body type ran more to Eddie. And when you come right down to it, I kind of admired Riff Raff — he was a faithful handyman, and throughout it all he kept his cool and stayed on mission. (Unlike many of my friends, I actually knew the film had a plot.) In the face of that indecision, making a costume just seemed like too much work.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking for a while that somebody should do a remake, if only to give it some modern production values. I know it’s supposed to be cheesy, but dear God those special effects are awful. I was pretty interested when I heard that Fox was planning a new made-for-TV version of Rocky Horror, but I stayed away from reading much about it because I knew it would be controversial among the fans, and I just don’t want to read endless complaints and bickering about every choice from casting to choreography. So maybe it will be fun, or maybe it will suck, or (worst of all) maybe it will just be mediocre, but I’m still looking forward to seeing it when it airs this Thursday night.

I did however stumble across a preview clip of the title sequence from the new version, and they’ve brought back Trixie from the play. She’s a movie theater usherette who sings the opening number, “Science Fiction/Double Feature,” to set up the frame that the rest of the play is supposed to be imagined as a cheesy low-budget B-movie. Richard O’Brien wanted to keep Trixie in the film, but it would have been too expensive, and since Rocky Horror was an actual low-budget B-grade movie, the frame wasn’t as important, so they saved a lot of money by just filming the now-iconic floating lips. Although this version of Rocky Horror is based on the film, not the play, I guess they decided to put Trixie back in because that’s how it was originally intended to be.

(Also, it’s rumored that much of the cost of the original opening was obtaining the rights to images from all the films that it references, and nowadays, even though they’re all science fiction classics, Rocky Horror is probably more famous than most of them.)

And it’s a good thing Trixie’s back, because Ivy Levan’s performance is stunning:

[Updated with new Fox-approved version of the video.]

One of the stories going around this week was that several black celebrities — including Spike Lee, Will Smith, and Jada Pinkett Smith — had announced they would not be attending the Academy Awards ceremony this year in protest of the lack of black acting nominees. Or as director Spike Lee put it in his oddly-capitalized Instagram rant:

How Is It Possible For The 2nd Consecutive Year All 20 Contenders Under The Actor Category Are White?

Let’s do the math.

When looking at racial statistics in the United States, it’s important to remember that black people really are a minority. I’ve seen complaints of the form “It’s outrageous that only 10% of <whatever> are black!”, but that’s actually not too bad. According to recent census estimates, approximately 12.6% of Americans are black, so 10% isn’t too far off. Depending what we’re talking about, the 2.6% difference could easily be explained by benign cultural and environmental differences.

Given that 12.6% of Americans are black, and assuming for purposes of the calculation that academy award voters are not racially biased in any way, what are the chances that not a single acting nominee is black? Could it just be random chance?

If there was only one nominee, then there would be a 12.6% chance of picking a black actor, which is the same as saying that there would be a 100% – 12.6% = 87.4% chance of picking a non-black actor. Expand the selection to two nominees, and there’s an 87.4% chance that the first one will be non-black, and then another 87.4% chance that the second one will also be non-black. So the chance of both of them being non-black is 87.4% * 87.4% = 76.4%. More generally, every time we add another person to the sample, that’s another 87.4% chance to keep the non-black streak going. So if we choose a group of N people at random, the chance of all of them being non-black is given by

From this, we can get the odds of all five nominees for Best Actor being non-black,

So we’d expect the Best Actor category to shut out black actors about half the time, even if the nomination process is completely colorblind. Add in Best Actress — raising the size of the sample to 10 nominees — and that works out to about 1-in-4 chance of a black shut-out:

Two years in a row makes it 20 people, and the odds get worse:

In other words, pure random chance will deliver an a slate of Best Actor and Best Actress nominees with no black nominees about 7% of the time.

I was just about to conclude that it’s not unreasonable that completely colorblind Academy could give black actors a two-year shutout entirely by chance, but then I noticed that Spike Lee says “For The 2nd Consecutive Year All 20 Contenders Under The Actor Category Are White.” At first I thought Lee made a mistake — I counted 20 Best Actor and Best Actress nominees over both years, i.e. two consecutive years of 10 nominees, not 20 — but then I realized Lee is also including the Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress categories, which also haven’t had any black people for two years. That’s a 40-person-long streak of non-black nominees. The odds of that are pretty low:

That’s less than a 1-in-200 chance that this could have happened entirely by random selection. That’s not impossible, but it’s pretty unlikely. By comparison, in the social sciences, any result that has a less than 1-in-20 chance of arising under random chance is considered significant enough to publish. The lack of black acting nominees is very unlikely to be random chance. Something is going on here.

These simple statistics alone, however, cannot tell us what that something is. All we’re doing is comparing the racial composition of the population of acting nominees to the racial composition of the entire population of the United States. There’s a lot of room between those two populations to explain the differences, which could be caused by a number of factors other than racist voters in the Academy. For example, just making stuff up off the top of my head,

• Perhaps cultural and environmental conditions make black Americans 10% less likely to think of acting as a legitimate career choice, and
• Perhaps racial bias in acting schools makes it 10% less likely that blacks will get in, and
• Perhaps racial bias in acting schools cause blacks to receive 10% less effective educations in acting, and
• Perhaps cultural and environmental conditions make black Americans 10% less able to devote time and energy to their acting careers (e.g. because of a greater need for a paying day job), and
• Perhaps racially biased casting directors are 10% less likely to cast black actors in the bit parts that will give them experience and exposure, and
• Perhaps racially biased screen writers are 10% less likely to write major parts for black characters, and
• Perhaps racially biased studio heads devote 10% less promotional effort to movies with black leads (possibly in response to racially biased audiences spending less on those movies), and finally
• Perhaps racially biased Acedemy voters are 10% less likely to vote for black actors and actresses.

Combine all of those elements, and the calculation looks something like this:

So if there’s a 10% drag on blacks at eight different places along the way, then the odds of a two-year shutout for the acting categories is about 1 in 9. That means this explanation is statistically plausible.

I should emphasize, however, that I totally made up those explanations and the numbers to go with them, merely as an illustration of the kinds of things that might influence the acting nominations. These are the kinds of things we might want to look for if we are serious about figuring out what’s happening. It could turn out that all of the bias is indeed at the Academy voting stage, in which case a boycott might be a sensible response. Or it could just be that there is just an accumulated drag on black actors which builds up enough over their careers to keep them out of the nominations. I have no idea.

But I can do the math. And at 1-in-200 odds…something is going on.